It implements an orchestration engine to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated like code. A native Heat template format is evolving, but Heat also aims to provide compatibility with the AWS CloudFormation template format, so that many existing CloudFormation templates can be launched on OpenStack. Heat provides both an OpenStack-native ReST API and a CloudFormation-compatible Query API.

Rico Lin offered this tutorial on how to auto-scale a self-healing cluster with Heat at the recent OpenInfra Days in Vietnam. Lin has been the project team lead for Heat in the Rocky, Pike and Queens cycles as well as a Heat core contributor member since the Liberty release. He’s currently a software engineer at EasyStack.

Here he walks you through how to configure Heat, set up Heat container agents before discussing options for auto-scaling, choosing your structure and then launching a self-healing cluster.